1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network communications technology, and more specifically, to mechanisms for splitting a synchronization message into multiple atomically processable components.
2. Background and Related Art
Computing technology has revolutionized the way people work and play and has contributed enormously to the advancement of humankind. Computers now aid in enumerable applications such as word processing, computer simulations, advanced gaming, voice recognition, among much more. Computing systems now come in a wide-variety of forms including, for example, desktop computers, laptop computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and even mobile telephones and devices.
Some mobile wireless devices such as Personal Digital Assistants and wireless telephones have sophisticated memory and general processing capability that allow the mobile device to perform many tasks previously only performed by larger desktop computers. These tasks may even include tasks that require communication over data networks. This allows users to access the Internet and perform e-mail tasks even while they are mobile. Nevertheless, despite such sophisticated handheld computing systems, memory tends to be much more limited in smaller devices as compared to larger desktop or even laptop computing systems.
Since the amount of system memory is relatively limited, the amount of memory allocated to a receive buffer may also be quite small. If the communication is larger, as tends to be the case when synchronizing hierarchical data structures, the communication may be larger than the receive buffer. This results in some of the communication being lost resulting in some cases in a complete loss in ability to process the communication.
Accordingly, what is desired are mechanisms for synchronizing hierarchical data structures for accommodating receive buffers that may be too small to accommodate all of the synchronization information in a single message.